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Faces of Modern American Literaturea Transnational and Transcultural Reading

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I. The Past is an Inexhaustible Resource Toni Morrison's Beloved ... III. The Past as an Uncanny Trespasser David Marshall Chan's 'Goblin Fruit' ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Faces of Modern American Literaturea Transnational and Transcultural Reading


1
Faces of Modern American Literaturea
Transnational and Transcultural Reading
  • Zhu Ying Julia
  • American Studies Program
  • East China Normal University
  • 1 June 2007, Shanghai

2
Outline
  • I. The Past is an Inexhaustible ResourceToni
    Morrisons Beloved
  • II. The Past Survives through TracesTheresa Hak
    Kyung Chas Dictee
  • III. The Past as an Uncanny TrespasserDavid
    Marshall Chans Goblin Fruit

3
Paul Ricoeur The Reality of the Historical Past
(1984)
  • three categories
  • The Same the past is re-enacted in the
    present through documentary evidence and
    imaginative construction
  • The Other the past is a pertinent absence due
    to temporal distance and otherness
  • The Analogue the past is re-created by the
    integration of re-enacting and distancing

4
I. The Past is an Inexhaustible ResourceToni
Morrisons Beloved
  • a. Living and Imagining the
    Historicalrevising the Same slave-narrative
    tradition
  • b. Rememorying the Past Configuring and
    TranslationBeloved and rememory as the Other
  • c. History Goes on Repatterned and
    Re-enactedstorytelling as a process of the
    Analogue

5
Toni Morrison
  • I cant change the future but I can change
    the past
  • (Taylor-Guthrie xiii)

6
National Amnesia
  • We live in a land where the past is always
    erased, Morrison contends, the past is absent
    or its romanticized. This American culture
    doesn't encourage dwelling on, let alone coming
    to terms with the truth about the past (Gilroy
    179).

7
Historical Evidence Historical Imagination
  • Margaret Garner A Tale of Horror in The
    Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (29 Jan. 1856)
  • James Van Der Zees photostory in The Harlem Book
    of the Dead (1978)

8
a. Beloved as a historical novel
  • It comes to those terrible spaces that
    nineteenth-century autobiographical slave
    narratives could not write about
  • It rips that veil drawn over proceedings too
    terrible to relate (Morrison, Site 110)
  • Sethes backAmy a chokecherry tree
  • The tree (trace) of scars on Sethes back is a
    living trace or record of the sufferings of the
    slaves a bearer of mute testimony to forgotten
    histories (Ellmann 46)

9
b. Rememory Beloved
  • Morrisons coinage
  • noun and verb visual and spatial quality
    individual and collective (Beloved 35-36)
  • memory as thought with a threat of repetition
    (Derrida 106)
  • continual entry and re-entry of past into
    present (Ferguson 112)
  • Sethes murdered daughter returnedan incubus of
    personal past
  • Survivor from the Middle Passagea historical
    trace
  • Unceremoniously buried slavesan absence of
    history

10
c. Reenacting with a Difference
  • Definers vs. DefinedSchoolteacher, sheriff, Paul
    D., and Sethe
  • double entendre pass on
  • sharing overlooking
  • ambivalent ending Beloved remembrance
    forgetfulness

11
Historia vs. Fictio (Facere)
  • As a work of fiction bound up with history,
    Beloved aims to free, retrospectively, certain
    possibilities that were not actualized in the
    historical past, and to perform its
    liberating function. The quasi-past of fiction in
    this way becomes the detector of possibilities
    buried in the actual past (Ricoeur,
    Interweaving 191-92)

12
II. The Past Survives through TracesTheresa Hak
Kyung Chas Dictee
  • From another epic another history. From the
    missing narrative. From the multitude of
    narratives. Missing. From the chronicles. For
    another telling for other recitations
  • (Dictee 81)

13
Paul Ricoeur
  • the past survives by leaving a trace
  • --The Reality of the Historical
    Past (11)

14
Ricoeurs Three Categories
  • a. The SameDictee is an imaginative and
    incoherent re-construction of documentary facts
  • b. The OtherDictee is a female and
    polycultural side of the Word
  • c. The AnalogueDictee is an enigmatic
    re-enactment of history and poetry

15
a. Dictee is a generic hybrid
  • Various dictation and translation exercises,
    including prayers, liturgical texts, mythological
    allusions, documents of Korean history, which is
    a history of repression but also one of rebellion
    against the political and cultural repression by
    the Japanese.
  • Chas mothers history of exile in Manchuria
    where she was forbidden to speak her Korean
    mother tongue.
  • The uprising of 1919 led by the Korean Jeanne
    dArc, Yu Guan Soon, in which thousands were
    killed.

16
collage
  • Personal letters, passages from history books, a
    petition sent by Hawaiian Koreans to President
    Theodore Roosevelt about the brutality of the
    Japanese Occupation (that the President ignored)
  • Excerpts from the autobiography of Saint Thérèse
    of Lisieux with a variety of visual texts
  • Empty pages and spaces between paragraphs marking
    rapture, collapse of voice, or meditative
    silence photographs, film stills, Korean,
    Chinese, and Japanese pictorial signs, the
    reproductions of handwritten letters, of
    paintings, maps, and illustrations such as four
    views of the larynx where voice is formed, speech
    uttered.

17
Dictee (1982)
  • A product of dictationa French dictation,
    presumably at a school of French Catholic
    missionaries.
  • Dictee, dictation opens a wide range of
    associations concerning power and repression the
    minds submission to the authority of the written
    wordfrom the rule of teachers to that of priests
    or missionaries, dictators and military
    oppressors, colonial regimes, or bureaucratic
    dispensers of immigrant identity.

18
b. dictée
  • A metaphor of political, linguistic, and cultural
    dominance.
  • Dictée has an additional meaningthe person who
    receives, is perhaps even formed by, dictation,
    is female since dictée also implies the gender
    of its object.
  • Against the male and (mono)cultural written
    dictum/decree, it sets a female voice and a
    polycultural perception that emphasizes
    difference.

19
Dicteenine chapters
  • Diseuse the opening sectionidentifies the
    narrator as female story teller, but also implies
    that someone is being spoken, who repeats and
    mimics but cannot yet speak for herself, stutters
    and stammers but is slowly and painfully finding
    voice and articulation The wait from pain to
    say. To not to. SayThe pause. Uttering. Hers
    now. Hers bare. The utter (4/5).

20
The Word
  • To submit, to give in to dictation is to take in,
    to internalize, the Word. But the tongue that
    takes the Host (the Word made Flesh) is also the
    tongue that is to utter speech in a foreign
    tongue as much as it is the place of the lost or
    forbidden mother tongue. The dictation GOD WHO
    HAS MADE YOU IN HIS OWN LIKENESS is accepted and
    repeated but also turned around in rebellious
    parody.

21
c. Clio History
  • Prelude to the first chaptera defiant evocation
    of the nominal In Nomine/ Le Nom/ Nomine (21)
    associates In Nomine Patris, in the Name of
    the Father, which, according to Lacan, is also
    the Law of the Father le Non du Père.
  • Inscribed in the very dictation of the title is
    thus also the rebellion of the one dictated to
    (dictée)and the dissolution of dictation into
    the multicultural, multilingual, multimedial
    play/performance of the text as counterscript
    (18).

22
Nine Myth
  • Nine chapters named after nine muses, the
    daughters of Mnemosynethe Greek goddess of
    memory, who had lain with Zeus for nine
    successive nights and give birth for nine
    successive days.
  • Allusions to Demeter who, in her grief, wandered
    nine days with flaming torches in her hands in
    search of her daughter Persephone.

23
First final pages
  • The first page is a photograph of an anonymous
    wall carving, according to secondary sources, it
    says in Korean script Mother, I miss you, I am
    hungry, I want to go home to my native
    placethis was probably scratched into a wall by
    Korean prisoners during Koreas occupation by the
    Japanese.
  • The final page is a photograph cut to show nine
    Korean students (among them the martyred Yu Guan
    Soon).

24
Lost Found
  • Text
  • The loss of voice and native place, the
    repression of mother tongue, the pain of division
    and fragmentation
  • Subtext
  • Connected with the number nine, is
    re-constructive, stages a finding of voice, a
    homecoming and a reunion of daughter and mother.

25
POLYMNIA SACRED POETRY
  • Words cast each by each to weather
  • avowed indisputably, to time,
  • If it should impress, make fossil trace of word,
  • residue of word, stand as a ruin stands,
  • simply, as mark
  • having relinquished itself to time to distance

  • (177)

26
Dictee as a poetic reading of the historical
trace
  • The text, although seemingly finding rest in a
    final vision of return, in fact, oscillates in
    the memory of absent presence since it can mark
    origin (home) only as lost to time and
    distanceas trace inscribed, and as ruin
    re-presented, in the word.
  • To evoke a pre-linguistic state of mind and
    communication that can yet be rendered only in
    and through words, a language beyond the dictate
    of the Fathera new (yet also re-constructed)
    Mother tongue.

27
Cha
  • The main body of my work is with Language,
    looking for the roots of language before it is
    born on the tip of the tongue. (Cha in Lewallen
    80)
  • My work has been a series of metaphors for
    the return, going back to a lost time and space,
    always in the imaginary. The content of my work
    has been the realization of the imprint, the
    inscription etched from the experience of
    leaving, the experience of America. (Cha in
    Lewallen 76)

28
Counterscript
  • The writing grew out of the painful experience of
    loss and exile, but opened up and explored a new,
    if purely linguistic, space of belonging the
    language before dictation where open, fluid,
    multiple (female) self is able to find voice and
    home in the very gaps and silences of the
    scattered text.

29
III. The Past as an Uncanny TrespasserDavid
Marshall Chans Goblin Fruit
  • I want this all to be a fiction, something I
    made up, something entirely of my own invention.
  • I want to wake up and have the past eighteen
    years be just a dream.
  • -- Goblin
    Fruit (39)

30
Dream
  • a. The Same Hollywood dream of fame.
  • b. The frustration of an Other imposter.
  • c. The living pain of being an Analogous
    brother.

31
a. Show business
  • the only work I read for requires an accent
    Japanese businessmen Im too young to pull off,
    or Korean grocers or Chinese restaurant delivery
    boys (28).
  • The only roles I ever get, it seems, are all in
    martial arts flicks, minor one-line parts
    (43).
  • Why is my life like the plot engine of an old
    Bruce Lee film? (43).

32
The World of Suzy Wong
  • And the bad roles and bad haircuts and stifled
    careers of the Asian American actors of the 70s
    and 80s and before, I sometimes feel all that
    history ought to have created a better place for
    actors like me. Our passages should have been
    paid, for a world without the Charlie Chans, the
    Suzy Wongs, the kowtowing maids and butlers and
    delivery boys. What happened, I want to know? How
    did that older generation let it slip through
    their fingers? (44)

33
everybody was too busy kung fu fighting
  • The old-timersthe Chinese who first came to
    Americahid their true names, adopted false ones
    I read this in college in an ethnic
    autobiography. They did this to elude their
    enemies and American officials, all those who
    were potential threats to them (46).

34
b. Im invisible
  • Ive stolen my brothers name. Ive lost my own
    name and replaced it with a dead boys. I no
    longer call myself D., but am now M. around town,
    some people recognized me for the imposter I am.
    Otherscasting agents, cameramen, other former
    child actors whove worked with my brotherbecome
    unnerved upon seeing me, mistaking me for the
    original M., or perhaps not wanting to remember
    how my brother died. To most people, though, Im
    invisible (23).

35
Goblin Men
  • were pitching it as the dark side of the
    E.T. storylike Honey, I Shrunk the Kids meets
    Aliens meets the Persephone myth as written by
    Clive Barker (34)
  • read pages 34-35.

36
c. Dream of a dead brother
  • Hes Ms been trespassing in my dreams. Hes
    taken residence in my thoughts. Maybe hes made
    that Ive stolen his name (46).
  • Maybe M. doesnt know that I mean him no harm,
    that all of my success is his own, all of it
    achieved in his shadow. He reduces me to a
    phantom of himselfhis legacy, his memory
    (46-7).
  • Their floodlights shine through to the dark
    corners of the room, revealing nothing, no
    ghosts (47).

37
The End
  • Thank you!
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